The term climate skeptic leaves a hell of a lot of room for manouver. It could mean you're skeptical of the policies or the science, or that global warming is bad or of the anthropogenic bit.

Or it could mean that you're just skeptical of one little bit of the conventional wisdom that is climate change science. In which case I can claim to be a climate skeptic too.

Last week I blogged about these words by Geoff Chambers "We don’t deny that global tem­per­at­ures have been rising irreg­u­larly for cen­turies, and that anthro­po­genic CO2 may be respons­ible for some of the recent rise. Where we dis­agree with the con­sensus is on the higher estim­ates of cli­mate sens­it­ivity endorsed by the IPCC and the cata­strophic effects which are sup­posed inev­it­ably to follow." Skeptics are moving the goalposts here. How is global cooling or Svensmark's cosmic ray theories, say, reflected in that statement ?

But it's a statement that makes the goalposts much much narrower, in fact it's basically unfalsifiable.

Perhaps that's why it's a meme being explored more and more by the skeptical blog-o-sphere. Witness Jo Nova's bad tempered blogpost in which she states "the debate (which you evidently aren’t aware of) is not about whether CO2 absorbs infra red, but whether that warming effect is significant."

So who's right, the majority of the world's top scientists or Jo Nova and co? Hell I don't know. But I'd venture the majority of the the world's top scientists trumps it because the question of the net importance of the greenhouse effect means weighing up a whole bunch of pluses and minuses to form a collective opinion. Climate skeptics cant and aren't matching that, they are merely picking holes - perhaps it should really be called Climate Pedantry.

Jo Nova is author of The Skeptics Handbook which states
(amongst other things): "Proof of Global Warming is not proof that
greenhouse gases caused that warming" I'm looking forward to reading
how Jo Nova has disowned that work.

Touring the Lucky Country giving speeches about how wrong climate scientists are must be nice work if you can get it, but Donna Laframboise has been getting her knickers in a twist about a consensus statement on coral reefs and climate change.

Donna's beef is that not only do the scientists agree, but they display no doubt about their findings. "The statement doesn’t sound scientific, however. For one thing, the language isn’t circumspect" moans Donna.

This is the same Donna Laframboise who wrote a book dissing the IPCC consensus. In which , musing on a favourite climate *skeptic* meme Donna wrote "it isn't terribly plausible that scientists [...] can know for certain that current temperature fluctuations aren't part of a [...] natural cycle."

So for Donna only certainty from scientists is good enough, except when scientists are certain and then it's not good at all.

I think the reasons why climate *skepticism* is doing well are much more varied than reported elsewhere.

It's objectives are (whilst not easy to define from without) much lower than proponents objectives.
To the disinterested the mere existence of climate skepticism is reason enough to ally oneself with it.
It's a constantly changing narrative, a cat of many colours. That keeps the interest of adherents. Science is carrying a millstone by comparison, science's narrative is the unchanging laws of physics, so not only are climate scientists wrong they are boring. The scientific debate is highly nuanced, this can easily be misinterpreted to mean scientists are divided on facts.

Contrarians are always looking for a sign of "bias" in AGW but don't apply that standard to themselves. The language is loaded, and indeed has been hijacked by contrarians insisting on being called "skeptics" and not deniers.

That's just the more active climate contrarians, those you come across on the net. For every climate contrarian/skeptic that's posted something on the net there must surely be a thousand more that have never bothered to learn anything about the climate. You know who I mean, your relative whom you only meet at weddings and funerals but is adept at parroting Fox News. How does science reach them? They are safely cocooned in the knowledge that climate change is nonsense because Someone Else Says So.

Above all, climate skepticism is more commentary than case. Contrarian Geoff Chambers defines skepticism thus "We don’t deny that global tem­per­at­ures have been rising irreg­u­larly for cen­turies, and that anthro­po­genic CO2 may be respons­ible for some of the recent rise. Where we dis­agree with the con­sensus is on the higher estim­ates of cli­mate sens­it­ivity endorsed by the IPCC and the cata­strophic effects which are sup­posed inev­it­ably to follow."

That may come as a surprise to many of the more casual climate contrarians/skeptics who think global warming is all a hoax or that it's all been disproved 'cos University of East Anglia scientists were caught sending and receiving emails , or that the world is in fact cooling.

Someone Else Says So may be a rational way of forming an opinion on what shoes to wear this autumn, but not on an issue as important as climate. It seems to me that the Someone Else Says So meme should really be populating the don't know camp but is in fact supporting an ill-informed brand of climate skepticism.